The Black Lung Captain (28 page)

Good advice,
thought Frey. He roled the
Ketty Jay
to starboard, swooping out of the
Storm Dog's
line of fire, and angled towards the barque. His guns couldn't scratch a frigate like the
Delirium Trigger,
but they could certainly put a few holes in the Awakener craft.

'Open fire!' he caled to Malvery. With exquisite timing, the
Storm Dog
picked that moment to unleash her battery of cannons in a deafening barrage.

The
Delirium Trigger
was taken completely by surprise. A chain of explosions ripped across her hul and deck, blooms of flame lighting her up against the rain and the dark. The force was enough to knock her off course and she went yawing and tipping to port. Frey grinned savagely as he imagined the panic and shock belowdecks. Surrounded by open terrain, when they thought they were al but invisible, they must have believed themselves safe from ambush. But Frey had proved otherwise.

Didn't see that one coming, did you, Trinica?

The
Storm Dog
thundered past the
Ketty Jay
as Frey went to take care of his own target. Grist was moving into position between the
Delirium Trigger
and the barque, to block her off and give Frey time to work. The
Delirium Trigger
would have her cannons in action in moments. She was wounded but far from finished.

The barque was slower to react to the attack. It continued on its course as if oblivious, widening the gap between itself and its escort. It was long and thin, the stern end boxy and stout with stubby fins sticking out to either side to serve as mounts for her ailerons. The foremost two-thirds of the craft was split along its length, giving it the look of a twin-bladed bayonet. A Dakkadian bayonet, like the one Frey had taken in the guts back in Samaria. The memory made Frey's stomach cramp unpleasantly.

He craned forward to see through the rain on the windglass, his finger hovering over the trigger on the flight stick. The barque was a design he'd never come across, and he had nowhere to aim. Not that it bothered Malvery, who was blasting away on the autocannon with reckless abandon.

'Jez!' he snapped urgently. 'You ever seen this kind of craft before?'

'It's a Kedson Harbinger, Cap'n.'

'Any idea where the aerium tanks are?'

'Two on each side, port and starboard. One about ten metres back from the bow, one beneath the ailerons.'

'I could kiss you.'

'I'd rather you didn't. Alsoul only knows where that mouth's been.'

The barque loomed closer. It stil hadn't showed any sign of reacting to the surprise attack. Slow crew, badly trained. That was good. They weren't pirates and they weren't Navy. What did Awakeners know about aerial combat?

Frey heard a below of cannon to port, and the night was lit by fire: the
Storm Dog
and the
Delirium Trigger
were engaging each other in earnest. He ignored them, hoping he was beneath their notice. In this visibility, with al that was going on, the
Delirium Trigger
probably didn't even know the
Ketty Jay
was there.

He adjusted his approach, aiming his machine guns for the aerium tanks on the barque's stern end. Shoot out the aerium tanks, and the craft would lose buoyancy and sink. Once they brought it down, it would be easy pickings.

'Steady,' he muttered to himself. 'Steady.'

A stutter of lightning lit up his target.

Not yet . . . not yet. . .

He pressed down on his guns, and at the same moment, the night exploded.

It was like being swatted by a giant. The
Ketty Jay
was thrown sideways, machine guns raking wildly along the flank of the barque. Frey was flung about in his seat and Jez almost fel out of hers. Pipes shrieked and burst out in the corridor, spraying gas and fluid everywhere. There was the sound of shattering glass and Malvery came tumbling down the ladder that led to the cupola. He crashed in a heap at the bottom, accompanied by a squal of wind and rain.

Frey had just about enough sense to pul the
Ketty Jay
aside in time to avoid ramming the side of the barque. They shot past on the aft side, passing through the backwash of the engines. The
Ketty Jay
was lifted and blasted aside, roling crazily, engines coughing as they threatened to stal.

Don't die on me, girl!
Frey begged his aircraft as he wrestled to stop her flipping entirely. Jez hung on to her seat for dear life. Malvery was sent skidding down the corridor on his back, belowing like a bewildered walrus. Frey could hear distant machine guns, and saw tracer fire gliding past him in the night from the direction of the barque. A moment later, a dozen sharp, punching impacts echoed through the
Ketty Jay.

'You never told me the damn thing was armed!' Frey screamed at Jez.

'I didn't think I needed to!' she screamed back. 'I thought you'd be expecting a little resistance!'

'Wel, you thought wrong!'

'Wel, you're an idiot!' she replied. Then, respectfuly, 'Cap'n.'

By now Frey had fought the
Ketty Jay
level, and the engines were settling down. They raced away from the barque and the
Delirium Trigger,
slipping safely out of range. Frey's hands were trembling. A freezing hurricane was blowing through the cockpit from the corridor. The cupola was smashed, and rain from outside lashed the passageway.

'Doc! Are you alright?' Frey caled through the door of the cockpit.

Malvery was piled against the engine room door in a position that had to be painful. 'Just about, Cap'n,' he wheezed.

'Damage report,' Frey ordered.

'Cuts and bruises. Bashed my knee pretty bad. I've felt better.'

'Not
you
. The aircraft.'

'Oh. Right-o,' said Malvery. 'I'l ask Silo, shal I?'

'Would you?'

Malvery' untangled himself and headed into the engine room while Frey turned the
Ketty Jay.

'Delirium Trigger's
putting out her fighters, Cap'n,' said Pinn in his ear. '
Storm Dog
too.'

'Get in there,' said Frey. 'Make sure none of them come after me.' He turned to look at Jez, who was arranging herself in her seat again. 'Okay. This time we do it right.'

The aerial battlefield swung into sight as he brought the
Ketty Jay
around for a second run at the barque. The
Delirium Trigger
and
Storm Dog
glided past each other in different directions, slow leviathans, their cannon batteries flashing. Gouts of yelow flame erupted from their huls; slabs of armour buckled and wheeled away into the storm. The
Delirium Trigger's
outflyers - Norbury Equalisers, fast and deadly - were spraying from her hangars, emerging to meet the
Storm Dog's
ragtag squadron of heavier fighter craft. Lightning flickered and thunder shattered the air.

Frey couldn't see Harkins or Pinn in the mix. They'd be waiting for their moment to dart in and hit the Equalisers. Satisfied that the
Delirium Trigger
and her outflyers were fuly occupied, Frey turned his attention back to the barque.

The Awakeners, foolishly, were making a run for it. Perhaps frightened by the sudden appearance of the
Storm Dog
, they'd boosted their thrusters and opened up distance between themselves and the
Delirium Trigger.
Maybe they believed they could lose themselves in the storm and escape, leaving their escort behind.

But al it did was rob them of their best defence.

Frey closed in on them. This time, he took an evasive pattern, roling and diving as he approached. A blast of artilery rattled the
Ketty Jay,
but it didn't come close enough to trouble them. The heavy machine guns fared little better. Tracer fire slipped out of the dark from the turrets on the back of the barque, but it waved about wildly and never got a fix. Now that he was moving around instead of coming in straight, they couldn't draw a bead on him.

'Engines weren't hit, Cap'n!' Malvery shouted from down the passageway. 'Rot knows where we took the bulets, but if you can't feel it in the controls then Silo says not to worry. We probably won't know until we explode.'

Frey barely heard him. He was focused only on his target.

Gunfire came at him from several turrets, but he slipped between it. He headed for the aerium tank at the end of the barque's port prong. With the autocannon out of commission, he only had the nose-mounted machine guns to work with. The trick was to graze the tank, causing a slow leak that would force the pilot to land the craft. But Frey was angry and shaken up, and not in the mood to be subtle. He squeezed the trigger hard, and kept it down. His machine guns didn't so much graze the tank as rip it apart.

The
Ketty Jay
dove underneath the barque as it vented a pungent cloud of aerium gas. Frey smelt it on the cold wind that whipped around the cockpit and blew his hair against his face. The barque slid through the sky overhead, metal groaning as it tilted. The sudden weight on its port side was puling it down.

Malvery stumbled into the cockpit, holding on to his glasses with one hand. 'Silo says go easy! Don't tax the engines too much!'

'She'l hold,' Frey said, through gritted teeth. 'Shut the door.'

Malvery hauled the door to the cockpit shut, closing out the wind from outside. Sporadic machine-gun fire folowed the
Ketty Jay
as Frey puled her around for another pass. The battle between the frigates was in ful swing. Their fleets were dogfighting in the space between and around them. Frey caught flickering glimpses of combat, punctuated by occasional explosions that pushed back the blackness for a moment. He heard Pinn's whoops in his ear, and Harkins' cowardly gibbering. They were stil in one piece, then. He took heart from that.

The barque was in trouble. It was stil moving at ful speed, kloms away from its escort, but it couldn't pul itself level and was flying aslant. At this distance, there would be no help from the
Delirium Trigger.
Its guns were having trouble aiming at anything as the pilot fought to correct the uneven weight of the twin huls.

Tracer fire burned away in al directions, but the artilery cannon had gone silent. Its operator knew that accuracy was impossible until the craft was under control, and had decided not to waste the ammo.

'Got you now, you son of a bitch,' Frey murmured. He raced in, heedless of the gunfire, aiming for the starboard bow tank. A smal voice of caution told him that he was supposed to be bringing this craft down gently, but he'd been scared by the barque's surprise attack and he wanted it out of commission, fast. He closed in and yawed to starboard, his machine guns clattering as they punched holes al along the barque's hul. His touch was lighter this time, but not by much.

Frey couldn't see the gas that spewed from the rupture, but he could see the effect. The barque's bow tilted downwards, the push of its thrusters driving it towards the ground. The pilot fought to compensate, but to no avail. The craft was too big and too clumsy.

The pilot airbraked as much as they could on the way down. Somehow they got the bow almost level, so it came in low and flat, like a skimmed stone.

Lightened by al the aerium in its stern tanks, the impact wasn't as hard as its size would suggest, but it was stil catastrophic. It hit the ground with a wail of metal, ploughing through the soft earth, rending a trench across the moors. Its double bow buckled and split. One of the prongs snapped off altogether. Its underside came away in shreds. An explosion tore through its flank, sending girders and armour plate wheeling through the night.

Finaly, after what seemed an age, it came to a halt in the shadow of a rocky outcrop. Crippled, wrecked, but mostly whole.

Malvery whistled. 'Nice one. Cap'n!" he exclaimed, amazed by the scale of the destruction.

'I'm just glad he left enough of it for us to rob,' Jez said.

'I brought it down, didn't I?' Frey said. He looked at Malvery. 'Go get Crake and Silo and tool up. We're boarding that thing. I want that sphere.'

'Right-o,' said Malvery. He made for the door, but Frey stopped him.

'Oh, Malvery? One more thing. Tel Crake to wake up Bess. We're gonna need her good and angry.'

Twenty

Manoeuvres In The Dark —- Pinn Is Distracted —

A Dreadful Opponent — Jez, And Yet Not Jez

Pinn was having a rare old time.

He swooped and roled and plunged, laughing maniacaly.

He sprayed tracer fire into the night, chasing half-seen phantoms through the rain. He yeled with joy whenever thunder boomed around him.

Visibility was terrible. The other fighters were flying wel below ful speed, afraid of a mid-air colision. Pinn concluded, therefore, that they were al pussies. He screamed through the skies at a speed that bordered on suicidal. Pinn was a man who lived without fear of death, because he was too dim to imagine it. For him, this was a happy hunting ground.

The fighters orbited their massive parent craft, which were locked in a deadly slugfest. Cannons blazed along their flanks. Turrets boomed and heavy machine guns tracked targets through the sky. Tactics had been al but abandoned as the two leviathans blasted chunks out of each other. It was al about who was the toughest, who could load and fire the fastest, who had the biggest guns. But the
Storm Dog's
surprise attack had put the
Delirium Trigger
on the back foot, and she was fighting for her survival.

Something shot out in front of Pinn, right to left, slashing through the storm. Too fast to see whether it was an aly or an enemy, but he felt the cockpit shudder as it passed. It had been mere metres from taking the nose off his aircraft and sending them both to a fiery grave.

He banked hard and set off in pursuit. Before him was only rain and darkness, but he knew that craft had to be out there somewhere. Then, a burst of machine guns, and his target was lit in the muzzle flash of its own weapon. He saw the teltale shape of a Norbury Equaliser: a rounded, bulbous bow end; straight wings, clipped at the end: a lean, narrow profile with a kinked back. Pinn grinned at the sight. He opened up the throttle and closed in.